This would be a great thing for the government to invest in, iterate upon, and stockpile strategically. Even if we can't use them now, it would be good for the future.

As an alternative to stockpiling, maybe someday it would be nice for the US to establish disaster relief factories, which have raw materials and rapid manufacturing equipment that can be used for a set of products, as needed. Create a set of product designs that share many of the same components and materials, but the products themselves differ in function and in the type of disaster they address. You could have a few teams of machinists and engineers who are paid to make and learn the designs for these disaster relief devices, which would require two weekends a month perhaps. When a disaster happens, you deploy them nearby and they produce the needed items.

Also, OMG:

"The farmer’s mother and brother took turns, squeezing the device 15 times a minute nonstop for 18 full days and nights, which kept him alive until a mechanical ventilator became available. Thirty days after being admitted to the hospital, the patient recovered enough to be weaned off the ventilator, and two weeks later he was sent home."

In the USA? Zero chance, unless a state of emergency makes accommodations I am not aware of. If one failed, due to not spending a lot of money and time doing quality control and getting certifications, and a patient died you would be sued out of existance.

In New Zealand you generally can't due for punative damages and lawsuits for medical misadventure are few to non-existent then maybe, but I am sure red tape would still prevent it.

Maybe it could be sold as a non-medical device, call it a "Happy Fun Breathing Simulator" with no explicit purpose and people would stock up on then.

In italy we are not to the point to have to choose which patient to save. Italy critical care capacity was 2500. Now increased, and we are fighting to increase it fasten than necesity (downing virus growing curve). Please see thi Lancet pubblication https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

There are enough normal contractors in the US that, if the will was there, you could be making hundreds of thousands of these in a month.

Speaking from experience, large US defense contractors are incapable of producing a single sheet of paper with the proper signoffs to make a plan to schedule a meeting about the need for ventilators in under two weeks.

I was considering an ask HN on just this. Having an effort from makers and professionals to come up with designs for mechanical ventilators when things get dire.

Now I understand jerry rigging medical devices is not advisable. But a pandemic like this may get to the point where DIY solutions may offer the solution.

I heard from a general practitioner that mechanical ventilators also have fine pressure control. Which would make the whole system a lot more complex. So given that I figured the concept was to flawed. But the design by MIT doesn't have these fancy ventilator function either. So it seems a cheap, available, basic ventilator would still be valuable.

It's a commercially available bag valve mask with a motor attached and controlled by what seems to be an open loop system. I think that the real takeaway here is that bag valve masks, apparently a low cost manual alternative to a respirator, exist.

Very nice, now if only they'd actually sell them...

For follow-up submissions like this, it's best to link from the main thread. I've done that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22574271

The Chinese and Italian doctors were saying that the equipment was the limiting factor in saving lives. That there just weren’t enough of them to go around, to handle the massive influx of patients flooding into the hospitals and clinics all at once.

We will need equipment like this to save lives.

I suspect that the Seattle situation is about to go hot. People with symptoms are not being tested, so they’re not being confirmed. Meanwhile, domestic and international flights are still going in and out of SeaTac. People are unknowingly carrying the virus to all different areas of the country. This might explain why seemingly random cases are popping up in the Midwest, from people who have never been to China or Europe. Essentially, the virus is building steam, and the country is about to see a massive increase of sickness in the coming weeks ahead. And the old and less healthy people will get hit very badly. We all will.

Time to buckle up, and hunker down.

plesae see link and pass among your networks. http://bit.ly/frontiertech4COVIDaction

Please see the link and share among your networks. http://bit.ly/frontiertech4COVIDaction